Software testing for safety-critical automotive systems

The automotive industry faces a significant challenge: to release
cars with zero software defects. The number of recalls and redesigns
due to software problems illustrates the magnitude of the challenge
– they have grown exponentially over the last decade. There are
major economic implications for manufacturers since the cost of
recalling a vehicle can be huge, especially when the issue affects
the integrity of the brand.

Manufacturers already spend a lot of money on software testing. In
fact, testing accounts for about 75% of the cost of software
development. And that spend is set to grow as the number of tests
that manufacturers have to run continues to increase.

But simply increasing the number of tests is not always the best way
to reduce defects. Improving tests, so that they exercise corner
cases that are not triggered by normal operation, improves quality.

Standards like ISO 26262 address the planning and development of
safety-critical systems and place further demands on software
testing. ISO 26262 provides an automotive-specific, risk-based
approach based on Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL). It
specifies the requirements and recommended methods for validation of
the safety levels including fault-injection testing.

Fault-injection testing
Fault injection helps to determine whether the response of a system
matches its specification in the presence of faults. It helps system
engineers to understand the effects of faults on the target system
behavior. It also helps to assess the efficiency of fault-tolerance
mechanisms, and enables the design team to reduce the presence of
faults during the design and implementation phases.

Fault injection can improve test coverage of safety mechanisms (at
the system level) by covering corner cases that are difficult to
trigger during normal operation. It is also recommended whenever a
hardware safety mechanism is defined, to analyze its response to
faults, and where arbitrary faults corrupting software or hardware
components must be injected to test safety mechanisms.

Fault categories
We can categorize faults as either software or hardware faults.
Within the hardware category, faults are either:

Permanent (triggered by component damage),

Transient (triggered by environmental conditions, also known
as soft errors), or

Automotive safety is really more crucial for a vehicle user. These days, Auto manufacturers making vehicles by using latest technologies. This is quite helpful to enhance Automotive safety. Various softwares now being used in car and other vehicles to improve the performance of the Auto info-system. Repair and replace of different Auto parts will also be useful for the safety as well. Volvo Repair Brighton MI